Why B2C Marketers Waited 2 Decades for CRM

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Eric Keating is the Vice President of Marketing at Zaius, a B2C CRM marketing platform. A go-to-market business leader, Eric is focused on helping top consumer brands grow by improving their understanding of customer behavior. Prior to joining Zaius, he was the vice president of the software-as-a-service division at Millward Brown Digital.

The value of customer relationship management (CRM) is no longer isolated to B2B companies. The rise of ecommerce, mobile shopping and multi-channel communications has led B2C marketers to take note and recognize the benefits of B2C CRM, shares, Eric Keating, Vice President of Marketing, Zaius

Since the term was coined in the mid-‘90s, customer relationship management (CRM) has played a significant role in business – but only for some types of business.

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Business-to-business companies have long benefited from the ability to manage their interactions with customers and prospects in a centralized place, powered by analytical insights that help them sell more products, more efficiently. Meanwhile, business-to-consumer companies had no such benefit.

While their B2B peers had database marketing and contact management in the ‘80s and CRM in the ‘90s, B2C companies primarily engaged with their customers and potential customers via a single channel – their brick-and-mortar stores. But the rise of ecommerce, mobile shopping and multi-channel communications have changed the way B2C companies interact with consumers. Given that shift, the value of CRM is no longer isolated to the businesses that cater solely to other businesses, and B2C marketers are taking note.

Here’s an example: let’s say you’re browsing for shoes on your iPhone while riding the train home from work. You see a great pair of boots on sale and put them in your shopping cart, then drop your phone in your bag when you get to your stop. If you log onto that retailer’s site after dinner and make a purchase from your laptop, the company sees one consumer who bought a pair of boots and one who abandoned a pair. Days later, when those boots have been delivered to your home, you’ll still be getting cart abandonment messages from the retailer, who doesn’t realize you’re walking around in the boots they keep urging you to buy.

B2B companies don’t have this problem. Increasingly sophisticated CRM solutions (and their predecessors) have enabled businesses to manage multiple accounts from other businesses, track the predictable sales process, nurture leads in the pipeline and tap into a unified customer view to analyze opportunities.

It might be tempting for today’s B2C marketers to borrow the same tools their B2B peers use, but that would not solve the challenge. B2B CRM is geared toward salespeople, not marketers. They’re designed to manage large accounts, with multiple stakeholders and complex, lengthy buying cycles. The lifetime value (LTV) and average sales price (ASP) involved in the analytics of B2B CRM are geared toward lower volume, higher value sales.

CRM solutions for B2C companies need to be more powerful. If a B2B company is fielding hundreds or thousands of target customers per quarter, a B2C company might be looking at millions of customer interactions per day, week or month. Selling into a handful of multi-million-dollar accounts is quite different from reaching those individual customers making quick decisions about whether to spend $50 on a pair of shoes. A B2C business needs the functionality to personalize marketing campaigns for a large customer base, targeting multiple sales per customer, and automatically resolving those fractured identities described above.

B2C CRM for the future of ecommerce

The CRM market that grew up in the ‘90s is catching up to the needs of B2C companies in this decade. As marketers and ecommerce retailers push for better ways to optimize campaigns, personalize communications and build loyalty among their customers, B2C-specific CRM is necessary to help them reach those goals.